Alter Ego
by shakespeare-lozza
Summary: ONESHOT - In his arms, I found something beautiful, something that reminded me that I was human. Even if I wasn’t myself... I didn’t care. As long as he loved me, I didn’t care about anything else... -idiom challenge-


**Alter Ego**

_idiom challenge : wear your heart upon your sleeve_

* * *

I always knew I wasn't pretty.

My cropped black hair a stark frame to my pallid complexion.

I'd wake up every morning and glance in the mirror hoping to see someone different, someone beautiful.

But I never changed.

My face remained steadfastly plain.

No matter how often I scrubbed my skin, my cheeks turning bruised with artificial colour, I knew he'd never look at me or see me as anything more than simply part of the scenery.

But that never stopped me from loving him.

I can still remember when he kissed me for the first time, his tongue running experimentally over the seam of my lips. I felt heat flush to my core, burning me from the inside out. I was afire with something more than girlish infatuation. Something harsher, overwhelming, ravaging through me with every touch of his lips… fleeting, butterfly kisses down my neck.

I'd fallen hard.

Every time he failed, I was always the one to comfort him.

The one who held him in her arms in his moments of weakness.

It was always me that he came back to.

But that day when he left me lying there, after he'd used me…

Taken me, with no whispers of love.

Brutal.

Unfeeling.

His eyes, distant.

Cold.

Almost as if he was anywhere but inside me, touching my heart with his every movement.

No.

In that instant I was nothing more than a vessel.

Hollow.

A play thing that would last for a few hours.

A distraction.

I realised I was nothing to him.

As he made my pulse quiver and my body strum with tension, as I could feel those feelings that welled like a pool deep within me, I knew he was always somewhere else.

His eyes always straying to her form as she'd pass us in the corridor.

And no matter how many times I told myself I was pure, I knew that no matter how noble my bloodlines, that fire simmering deep within him, didn't care that she was nothing more than dirt.

Mud that was far beneath his notice.

Love is blind, they say.

I had never heard anything so disgusting.

* * *

I never thought he'd kiss me again.

I never thought that he would look at me with such fire in his eyes.

… however that niggling thought in the back of my consciousness, kept reminding me that it wasn't me he was looking at.

But I shoved the thought away, as his fingers caressed the flesh of my back.

Gentle.

Caring.

Nothing like how I had been touched before.

Not in any way like he had touched the old me.

He whispered sweetly in my ear, words of praise as I felt my body arch against him, his soft breaths echoing the primal pulsations that rocked my frame.

In his arms I found something beautiful, something that reminded me that I was human.

Even if I wasn't myself.

I didn't care. As long as he loved me, I didn't care about anything else.

It was only when darkness flooded the room and my hair appeared more inky black in the gloom that I drew myself away from his heated frame, even sensual in sleep.

I walked with quiet footsteps to the bathroom mirror.

In less than an instant, my mahogany rush of curls and soulful brown eyes melted away.

And there I was again.

She.

That part of me I had locked away.

That girl, Pansy Parkinson, steadfastly plain, her heart pinioned to her sleeve…

bleeding…

droplets of blood pitting on the floor, draining me...

His voice sounded authoritatively from the adjoining room, calling...

I would have smiled.

"Granger, come back to bed."

The taste of polyjuice potion hit my lips, washing over my palette. Its sour taste running like poison down my throat, killing that other part of me that struggled to breathe.

If he hadn't said her name, I would have smiled.

I watched in subdued horror, one that had become an hourly occurrence to me, as that girl who had stolen my world, suddenly looked back at me.

Naked.

Vulnerable.

Yet with eyes that seemed ever so weary, out of place on her face.

Luckily he never noticed.

He was my all.

My everything.

And even when their heated rivalry turned into something sickeningly sweet…

I never stopped caring.


End file.
